[✔️] February 17, 2022 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[👀 Richard Pauli]

/*February  17, 2022*/

/[ important to know of this International list of job openings in areas 
of Climate Change - a weekly mailing  ]
/*Climate Change Job Vacancies Update - IISD Community *
Latest Climate Change Job Vacancies - 17 February 2022
A weekly compilation of job announcements recently posted to the Climate
Change Job Vacancies listing from our IISD Community subscribers
https://community.iisd.org/climate-change-job-vacancies-update/2022-02-17/



/[  data sets academic paper ]/
16 February 2022
*A global dataset for the projected impacts of climate change on four 
major crops*
Toshihiro Hasegawa, Hitomi Wakatsuki, Hui Ju, Shalika Vyas, Gerald C. 
Nelson, Aidan Farrell, Delphine Deryng, Francisco Meza & David Makowski
Scientific Data volume 9, Article number: 58 (2022) Cite this article

Abstract

    Reliable estimates of the impacts of climate change on crop
    production are critical for assessing the sustainability of food
    systems. Global, regional, and site-specific crop simulation studies
    have been conducted for nearly four decades, representing valuable
    sources of information for climate change impact assessments.
    However, the wealth of data produced by these studies has not been
    made publicly available. Here, we develop a global dataset by
    consolidating previously published meta-analyses and data collected
    through a new literature search covering recent crop simulations.
    The new global dataset builds on 8703 simulations from 202 studies
    published between 1984 and 2020. It contains projected yields of
    four major crops (maize, rice, soybean, and wheat) in 91 countries
    under major emission scenarios for the 21st century, with and
    without adaptation measures, along with geographical coordinates,
    current temperature and precipitation levels, projected temperature
    and precipitation changes. This dataset provides a solid basis for a
    quantitative assessment of the impacts of climate change on crop
    production and will facilitate the rapidly developing data-driven
    machine learning applications.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-022-01150-7



/[ this is opinion, but it's not news ]/
*Opinion: As climate change worsens, Republicans insist we must do nothing*
By Paul Waldman
Columnist - - Feb 16, 2022
Back in 2008, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and former speaker 
Newt Gingrich recorded a television ad in which they acknowledged their 
bitter political differences, but made a shared commitment on one 
critical issue.

“We do agree,” said Gingrich, “our country must take action to address 
climate change.” He added: “If enough of us demand action from our 
leaders, we can spark the innovation we need.”

Somehow, that new Republican understanding of the importance of 
addressing climate change never quite caught on. If anything, as the 
effects of climate change intensify, the GOP has become more committed 
to opposing any and all efforts to do something about it.

Let’s take a look at some of the latest major climate news:

    - The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a
    report showing that coastal sea levels will rise by an entire foot
    between now and 2050, “intensifying the threat of flooding and
    erosion to coastal communities across the country.”

    - A new study shows that the ongoing drought in the western states
    has made this the driest period there in 1,200 years.

    - The climate provisions in the Build Back Better bill are on ice,
    now that BBB has stalled amid lockstep Republican opposition. The
    Post reports that this has “frozen hundreds of billions of dollars
    in private capital” earmarked for climate projects across the
    country, which has “complicated America’s much-touted clean energy
    revolution.”

    - Republicans are trying to block President Biden’s nomination of
    Sarah Bloom Raskin as chief banking regulator at the Federal
    Reserve. Why? Because she has advocated for the financial industry
    to do more to plan for the economic effects of climate change.

    - Spurred by climate-denial organizations, Republican legislators at
    the state level are working to prevent officials from dealing with
    businesses that are moving to wean themselves from fossil fuels or
    otherwise taking climate change seriously.

    - In Florida — where there is ample sunshine — Republicans in the
    legislature are working with the state’s largest utility to
    undermine net metering, the hugely popular system under which
    customers with solar panels send back surplus energy to the grid.
    Solar companies in Florida say if the bill passes, they’ll have to
    shut down and move to other states.

  It wouldn’t be fair to portray the Republican Party as an absolute 
monolith on climate — a smattering of Republican officials here and 
there say they would like to do something on climate, even if their 
solutions always seem to include uninterrupted drilling and burning of 
fossil fuels.

  And the Republican electorate has complicated views on the topic. 
Depending on how pollsters ask them, a majority of Republicans sometimes 
express concern about climate and support various ideas to reduce 
emissions. But by other measures, Republicans have actually grown less 
concerned about climate in recent years.

If that’s the case, it could be partly because the administration of 
Republican god-king Donald Trump was the most aggressively 
anti-environment in history. Or it could be because as you move down the 
funnel from vague popular notions to elite opinion and finally to 
policies the party supports, the closer you get to the apparent belief 
that conservative identity-signaling requires one to oppose doing 
anything at all to slow global warming.

Take the Sarah Bloom Raskin situation. The Senate Banking Committee 
isn’t filled with fire-breathing Republican culture warriors; some of 
its members, such as Tim Scott of South Carolina or Richard C. Shelby of 
Alabama, are what passes for serious legislators in today’s GOP. But 
every one of them has joined in boycotting her nomination — not just 
voting against it, but denying the committee a quorum so it can’t take a 
vote at all.

That’s even though they know there’s only so much the Federal Reserve 
can do about climate change. What sane people like Raskin suggest is 
that the Fed help banks understand the risks climate change poses to 
their own stability, to limit economic fallout from future disasters, 
whether sudden or slow-moving.

For instance, in 2021 natural disasters caused $145 billion in damage, a 
figure that included 20 separate wildfires, hurricanes, floods and 
storms with price tags over a billion dollars. To say the increasing 
frequency of such events isn’t something banks need to prepare for is 
utterly bonkers.

Yet Sen. Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania, the ranking Republican on 
the committee, is waging a crusade against Raskin. He wrote a letter to 
Biden lamenting the fact that no one from the fossil fuel industry sits 
on the Federal Reserve Board, and saying Raskin’s “demonstrated 
hostility” to fossil fuels is “unacceptable.” The other Republicans on 
the committee seem to agree.

So today, the consensus Republican position appears to be that even 
thinking about climate change in economic policy is a threat to 
prosperity, a stunningly upside-down perspective on the future of the 
economy. Meanwhile, the more liberal position within the GOP is 
essentially that while climate change is real and perhaps we shouldn’t 
actively work to make it worse, we shouldn’t do much of anything to make 
it better either.

This means that every step of progress we make on climate will only come 
after a fight. And with the power they wield, Republicans will make 
those fights as long and difficult as possible.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/16/climate-change-worsens/



/[  Really?    Old news, new framing  - ice melting is exponential 
change ] /
*US could see a century’s worth of sea rise in just 30 years*
By SETH BORENSTEIN - Feb 15, 2022
America’s coastline will see sea levels rise in the next 30 years by as 
much as they did in the entire 20th century, with major Eastern cities 
hit regularly with costly floods even on sunny days, a government report 
warns...
- -
Cities such as Miami Beach, Florida; Annapolis, Maryland; and Norfolk, 
Virginia, already get a few minor “nuisance” floods a year during high 
tides, but those will be replaced by several “moderate” floods a year by 
mid-century, ones that cause property damage, the researchers said.

“It’s going to be areas that haven’t been flooding that are starting to 
flood,” Sweet said in an interview. “Many of our major metropolitan 
areas on the East Coast are going to be increasingly at risk.”

The western Gulf of Mexico coast, should get hit the most with the 
highest sea level rise — 16 to 18 inches (0.4 to 0.45 meters) — by 2050, 
the report said. And that means more than 10 moderate property-damaging 
sunny-day floods and one “major” high tide flood event a year.

The eastern Gulf of Mexico should expect 14 to 16 inches (0.35 to 0.4 
meters) of sea level rise by 2050 and three moderate sunny-day floods a 
year. By mid-century, the Southeast coast should get a foot to 14 inches 
(0.3 to 0.35 meters) of sea level rise and four sunny-day moderate 
floods a year, while the Northeast coast should get 10 inches to a foot 
(0.25 to 0.3 meters) of sea level rise and six moderate sunny-day floods 
a year.

Both the Hawaiian Islands and Southwestern coast should expect 6 to 8 
inches (0.15 to 0.2 meters) of sea level rise by mid-century, with the 
Northwest coast seeing only 4 to 6 inches (0.1 to 0.15 meters). The 
Pacific coastline will get more than 10 minor nuisance sunny-day floods 
a year but only about one moderate one a year, with Hawaii getting even 
less than that.

And that’s just until 2050. The report is projecting an average of about 
2 feet of sea level rise in the United States — more in the East, less 
in the West — by the end of the century.
https://apnews.com/article/floods-climate-science-national-oceanic-and-atmospheric-administration-texas-81ea3dfde46f98ed675c92a0447c8114



/[ Unitarian minister gives larger video lecture #2 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkapCiU2EUc   ] /
*10 Inevitables: Post Doom, No Gloom (49-min: Mid-size Healthy Meal)*
Feb 15, 2022
thegreatstory
THESIS (49-min): Confusion and collective insanity reign without a 
life-centered view of ecology, energy, and history. Enthralled by 
gee-whiz technology, and blind to ten collapse-related inevitabilities, 
we stumble into a future of ecological and societal certainties that 
most people cannot see, or will vehemently deny...

    1. Most people will have a hard time trusting how & why our
    civilization is collapsing.
    2. Abrupt climate mayhem (rapid 2C+) locks in biospheric collapse &
    extinctions.
    3. Tipping points already crossed will be falsely framed as “still
    avoidable”.
    4. Without “Assisted Migration” love-in-action, most plant species
    will go extinct.
    5. Without urgent collective action, there will be dozens of nuclear
    meltdowns.
    6. As our biospheric and societal predicament worsens, so will our
    mental health.
    7. Most people will only reluctantly relinquish their faith in “the
    Almighty We”.
    8. If you proselytize only the doom side of collapse reality, expect
    to be shunned.
    9. Most people will crave distraction — and virtually anything that
    offers “hope”.
    10. Elite universities, IPCC, MSM, & pols will remain first-rate
    legal hopium dealers.

https://youtu.be/BkapCiU2EUc
PRESENTER: Michael Dowd
Post-doom website: https://postdoom.com/
Dowd/Barlow site: https://soundcloud.com/michael-dowd-grace-limits/sets
Dowd personal/media site: 
https://soundcloud.com/michael-dowd-grace-limits/sets
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkapCiU2EUc



/[  another commentary on the movie "Don't Look Up"]/
*Comet of Deliverance*
A socio-spiritual review of Don't Look Up
Charles Eisenstein
Jan 10, 2022
I’m taking time off writing a long and frustrating essay to review a 
film I saw last night, Netflix’ popular Don’t Look Up. Spoiler alert! 
Maybe best to watch it first.

In the film, a planet-killing comet is headed toward earth. The world 
responds mostly with disbelief. Humanity lowers its eyes onto its 
cellphone screens, memes, celebrity news, and political spectacles, 
avoiding the truth of what science is plainly telling them. There is a 
chance to deflect the comet—but will humanity be able to unite in the 
seriousness of that task enough to actually accomplish it?

The film is one on level a hilarious portrait of our society at its most 
superficial. Its supporting characters are comically and deliberately 
overdrawn—but not so much that we cannot recognize their type among our 
public figures. Its portrayals of media and social media silliness 
likewise elicit uncomfortable laughter, uncomfortable because they need 
exaggerate so little.

Beyond the comedic level are two layers of allegory, one social, one 
spiritual. What is the real-life equivalent of a planet-killing comet 
certain to hit the earth? What is the threat that scientists keep 
warning us about? That a large minority of the public disbelieves? The 
obvious candidate is climate change. As in the film, powerful financial 
interests, especially in extractive industries, seek to turn the threat 
to their own advantage, even at the cost of worsening the threat.1 As in 
the film, politicians twist the warnings of scientists into politically 
advantageous narratives. As in the film, the public continues blithely 
to live life as normal, as if nothing bad were happening. They continue 
to do so until the crisis literally stares them in the face.

Here the analogy wavers. For one thing, climate change is not a discrete 
event that a simple Newtonian calculation can locate in time. Nor does 
it admit to a one-shot solution such as deflecting a comet with nukes, 
which would allow the rest of life to proceed as normal. There is no 
single cause of the climate crisis—notwithstanding the obsession with 
reducing it to a matter of greenhouse gases.2 On this level, the film 
tries to fit a complex problem into a simplifying single-cause, 
single-response template. If only the future hung on just one threat. If 
only that threat came from outside ourselves. If only it could be met 
with force.

Today in particular the film’s background theme of “we should’ve 
listened to the scientists” rings hollow. In early 2020, government 
leaders took the dire warnings of vocal scientists very seriously and 
implemented authoritarian lockdown and quarantine policies. The 
scientists warned of tens of millions of deaths and the complete 
collapse of the healthcare system. These predictions turned out to be 
off by an order of magnitude. Then, the voice of the scientific 
establishment heralded mass vaccination as the solution to the crisis, 
assuring us that it would deflect the comet from Earth. Many of us did 
not believe them. Are we ignorant boobs like the public in Don’t Look 
Up? Or is it that we intuit what the public eventually wakes up to: 
“They’ve been lying to us.”

Recent developments indicate the latter.3 It is as if in the film the 
comet misses Earth and instead enters into orbit. Only a few fragments 
hit the ground, causing moderate damage. The government sustains the 
fear by warning the whole comet might plunge to earth at any time. It 
sends one array after another of nuclear devices to prevent that from 
happening (with great profit to their manufacturers). The first didn’t 
do the job—a booster is needed. And meanwhile, the radioactive fallout 
is causing more damage than the comet did.

Luckily, there is much more to this layered, inventive film than a 
moralizing “we should have listened to the scientists.” That is more a 
trope than its main message. Its main message is timeless and timely, 
foreshadowed throughout the film before emerging powerfully in the last 
ten minutes.

You see, there is another level of allegory in the film, more intimate 
than climate change and more indubitable. What is this comet, come 
unerringly to obliterate the world? The comet is our own death, each and 
every one of us. While we cannot normally predict its precise timing, it 
is both inevitable and close at hand. In the end we realize: there never 
was that much time. Each person and each moment was precious. Like the 
silly people in the film, we obscure that preciousness with a parade of 
inanities, pretending until death stares us in the face that life isn’t 
finite. We, like they, are absorbed by a fake reality from which we 
rarely look up. Only when they actually saw the comet near at hand did 
they finally believe it for real, just as the reality of our own 
mortality truly sinks in when we have a brush with death or are present 
at the death of a loved one.

And what did the main characters do, when the reality of certain death 
sank in? They had a family dinner. They did mundane, human things—what 
else is there to do? Yet every moment was infused with intimacy and 
illuminated by grace. So it is for any of us when death makes its 
presence known. We don’t stop doing human things. We attend to the 
details of material life as before—again, what else is there to do?—but 
what was always mundane becomes now sacred too.

The knowledge of death restores the intimacy and grace that modern life 
so sorely lacks. That lack takes cinematic form in the vapid, cartoonish 
supporting characters of Don’t Look Up, so that the remedy stands out 
all the more sharply.

The illness seeks the medicine. We have long been hungry for an 
existential crisis (Y2K, Peak Oil, climate change, etc.), not only to 
bring us together in unity of purpose, but to wake us up to what’s real.

Every alarmist prediction and every disaster film carries this truth: 
“We are all going to die.” Disaster movies appeal to us precisely 
because we so desperately need to see that. The technological 
recklessness that repeatedly courts calamity, poisoning earth, water, 
body, and genome, destroying global ecosystems, flirting with nuclear 
holocaust, happens in obliviousness to the preciousness of what it 
threatens. What medicine can deliver us from the madness swirling around 
civilization’s central void? (The void of sense and meaning that colors 
our grandest ambitions with a tinge of superficiality.) It isn’t just a 
new story that we need. That is secondary. We long to reconnect to the 
truth beyond the veil of death-denial.

The comet therefore represents not just doom, but deliverance. The ego’s 
attempts to avoid death, whether through its own delusions or vain 
pursuits of actual longevity or immortality, are as hopeless as the 
scheme in the film to deflect the comet. Facing death in truth, we know 
there is something more important than avoiding it. It is to live well, 
in intimacy and grace. That is why Professor Mindy refused a seat on the 
escape ship.

Don’t Look Up brings to mind another film that explores a similar theme. 
It is Lars von Trier’s sublime masterpiece Melancholia, also about a 
huge asteroid on a collision course with Earth. It depicts the severe 
depression of a young woman who would rather withdraw from life entirely 
rather than live the pretend life that others expect of her. As the 
people around her crack under the pressure of impending doom, she 
remains calm. Having withdrawn from the drama, she is already in a sense 
dead. Having let go of all illusions and pretenses, the collapse of the 
world means little to her. But then in one of the most beautiful, 
quietly overwhelming cinematic closing scenes I’ve ever watched, she 
dispels her depression in an act of hopeless, senseless kindness, at 
once transcendent and mundane.

In the face of death, isn’t any act senseless? Every plan and ambition 
scatters as dust in the gale. Nothing is to any selfish purpose. From 
the ruin of the self, a new sense and purpose arises. “Nothing matters” 
gives birth to “everything matters.” A great light is born within the void.
https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/comet-of-deliverance?r=10305



/[ back nearly 3 decades ]/
*On this day in the history of global warming February 17, 1993*

February 17, 1993: In an address to a joint session of Congress, 
President Clinton, noting the "challenges to the health of our global 
environment," declares, "Our plan does include a broad-based tax on 
energy, and I want to tell you why I selected this and why I think it's 
a good idea. I recommend that we adopt a BTU tax on the heat content of 
energy as the best way to provide us with revenue to lower the deficit 
because it also combats pollution, promotes energy efficiency, promotes 
the independence, economically, of this country as well as helping to 
reduce the debt, and because it does not discriminate against any area. 
Unlike a carbon tax, that's not too hard on the coal States; unlike a 
gas tax, that's not too tough on people who drive a long way to work; 
unlike an ad valorem tax, it doesn't increase just when the price of an 
energy source goes up. And it is environmentally responsible. It will 
help us in the future as well as in the present with the deficit."

(The effort to implement the BTU tax would ultimately fail, thanks to 
aggressive attacks on the concept by fossil-fuel-industry front groups 
such as the Koch Industries-funded Citizens for a Sound Economy, the 
forerunner to Americans for Prosperity.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=840MahAgJh0


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